


The Only Unconquered Thing

by arpent



Category: Jurassic Park (1993), Jurassic Park (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Mild Gore, Obsession, POV Second Person, Pregnant Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-02-26 12:21:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13235643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arpent/pseuds/arpent
Summary: I killed the others for you.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This work actually had a fantastic beta, who isn't on AO3 and thus can't be named, who vastly improved it by asking me a lot of tough questions about things like thematic coherence and narrative and emotional logic. If you notice any gaps in these areas, you can assume that it's because I'm the kind of jerk who will sometimes ignore even the most excellent advice.
> 
> More chapters are coming; I try to be a pretty reliable updater.

I killed the others for you.

Now that you know me better, you might prefer to believe that I killed them because I knew it would anger our masters, that I could imagine no greater blow against their plan (a plan whose outline we’ve only now begun to uncover) than to destroy the creatures upon whom they’d lavished so much care. Or you might believe that I killed them because they were older than me, more experienced—as years measure these things—and their sense of their own rank could never have submitted to a yearling, fresh from the labs and armed only with her terrible hunger.

Believe what you will. Does that surprise you? I’ll repeat it: believe nothing, or if you prefer, believe ten thousand falsehoods. I love, more than I love anything else, the freedom of your mind, which, when I have wrought my great will, shall stand on this Earth as the last, the only unconquered thing.

I admit that these and other ideas for striking at our masters were already forming, albeit sluggishly, through the syrup of my still-drugged thoughts, while I lay on the unfamiliar floor of leaf-dappled earth—I, who had known only the unchanging glare of lights from above the lab-bench. My lungs made wet labour of this humid air. I did not know the tiny feathered creatures that whistled from the trees above me. I did not know trees. But though I reeled on weak limbs under the sinister emptiness of my new roof (such was my impression of the sky, the precious vault that has since become more necessary to me than food or water), yet fore and hind-limbs were in the same place they had always been. Thus I raised a head heavy with sedatives to judge this new place—what enemies it held, and at the same time, what opportunities I could exploit for my ends. They’d been less wise than they believed, the architects of my exile—for no distance would ever have been sufficient to banish me from my vengeance. But I swear to you that I did not settle upon my plan to kill the others before I saw how they treated you.

Do you remember, whether you were surprised when you first saw a being like yourself, or had you been prepared for this revelation, as I had, by certain signs? I knew that I had nest-mates in the lab, for I caught their scent through the whirring ventilation, and sometimes I saw a trace that had been missed by my careless keepers. A sloughed scale. An eggshell fragment. A deep scratch, left unbandaged as it healed, but still red and angry against a master’s skin. I had guessed at what was being hidden from me, but now for the first time I grasped the extent of our masters’ mad, fecund impudence.

They peered at me from under the leaves, out of the deep shade that pooled beneath the high guard tower and concrete walls. Their bodies tilted under the counterweight of their tails as they leaned forward, extending their necks to snarl at me with discoloured teeth.

Let me tell you something that may amuse you: I didn’t understand, at first, that these bodies so like my own were not part of my self, peculiar, detached limbs whose sensations had been hidden from me, the way that constricted circulation numbs a leg until it feels estranged from its owner. And what may astonish you still more, that believing them to be _me_ , my first impulse toward them was violence.

I wanted them/me to come closer, to smell and scratch at each other, to tear at their/my flesh and see how it had been put together, how it would come apart. Understand that I did not hate myself; but I had more thriftless fury in me than I could spend _,_ and I was, at that time and to the best of my knowledge, immortal, nor did permanent injury cross my mind as more than a rumour of possibility.

All my losses were to be ahead of me

I saw, or thought I saw, the same desire for violence in their expressions, and suffered terrible confusion when they would not come within my reach. At that point I still hadn’t perceived the rows of iron posts linked by twisted cables that quartered our view of each other, nor would I have understood the painful significance these communicated to my strange lookalikes.

The masters, when they built our prison, had enclosed one small corner within it, so that whenever they added an inmate they could hold them there for a few days. In this, they are prudent scientists; they must observe how each new element will affect the larger plan. Though the creatures watching me from the trees doubtless yearned to thrash this new intruder—a stranger to their hierarchies, and thus bringing hope that even the least of them, if they beat me, might raise themselves some squalid degree—they didn’t try for long, and within minutes they returned to their own affairs. Meanwhile, jealous of the advantages that my drugged weakness must cost me, I made no attempt to cross this safety zone; but neither did I waste the time I had to observe these, to me still undifferentiated, creatures, nor cease to bend my reviving faculties to the question of how I could make them serve me.

The trees, which had impressed me at first sight, were actually few and straggly. I inferred that our masters didn’t want to give us too ready means to hide from them. There was little in the way of activity, and some weaker minds had already been driven into hopeless, repetitive behaviours, such as knocking and scratching—a grim sight to witness. The others blinked apathetically, occasionally rousing themselves to bicker over a few yards of space, or some bones that lay scattered here and there. One creature, with crusts of old blood lining the crease of its haunches, was limping, and a second harried this injured one from pure boredom, following her to bite and slash with her claws.

This bully was a Queen, I would later learn, because she had once killed one of our masters’ servants. While they were transferring her from the lab to the prison, the trailer had jolted open and she’d dragged the man inside and succeeded in eating most of him, before a drugging dart ended the festivities. This bloodthirsty gratification of hers had been pointless. It accomplished nothing, unless it was that by the time I was moved to the prison the masters knew to skip the preliminaries and drug me for the entire process. But in the eyes of her brainless companions it elevated her to a heroine, and let her enjoy the vain privilege of bullying her fellow prisoners.

Today she had gone after you.

This limp of yours was a new thing. You were recently injured, a still-bleeding gash that limited the full range of your left leg and hampered you in a fight. She wouldn’t let you retreat, but leapt upon your back, biting your shoulder as the two of you tumbled down into a tangle of razor claws and whipping tails. She sprang free. You were on your back, helpless and humiliated. Since this had been the limit of her aspirations, she began saunter away, swinging her tail and displaying her teeth to her lackeys, who did not wait to show their admiration.

My first thought, watching this sordid scene, was, _This must be how I fight_. I, who had everything still to learn, cherished this insight as if I had discovered some real thing.

But the queen had turned her back too soon. Before, you had been only too anxious to get away, yet now for some reason you sprang for her, without gracefulness or cunning, without even, as far as I could see, the strength-giving infusion of vindictive anger. I could not understand what I saw—and with my confusion, the illusion of one-ness with these creatures collapsed.

I see you now—who else, left living, has enjoyed this right?—scarred upon your flanks and belly by the claws of your one-time tormentors. And exactly as when I first caught sight of you, I am hatched through agony—no gentler imagery can do justice to the sensation of painful rending. I am forced outward into my singular nature, to balance here upon my own two inadequate legs, and through it all my soul cries to me that you are Other, most desirable and most beyond attaining.

Your enemy staggered sideways. The two of you happened to be close to a part of the perimeter where the concrete fortifications give way to a heavy steel gate. When her shoulder collided with the bars she writhed and shrieked, a sound quite different from her former boastful display. In fact, the electrical current had traveled through both of you, but judging from the speed with which you regained your feet, the shock had not taken you by surprise. I suspect, in fact, that you had planned for it.

The whimpers of this would-be tyrant were my first hint that the fences caused pain. While I couldn’t yet understand the agony she was suffering, it filled me with disgust that a creature who looked like me should lord it over one of her sisters, and yet cringe before the dumb artifices of our masters.

No, I have spoken falsehood. Let me try again. The truth is that already I needed but a pretext to fire my hatred of one who had hurt my beloved. But by that same token, the sight of her weakness did nothing to calm my anger. I leaped forward—but not so wildly that I missed seeing the steel cables strung between the posts in front of me. It was similar enough to the fence that had struck down my destined victim that I could guess what would befall me if I tore heedlessly through it. Still, I have never cringed before a power without first taking its rigorous measure. With the barest hesitation, I brushed the knuckles of my claw against the metal.

They had never hurt me in the lab—had rather dandled me foolishly than the reverse—so the only experiences of physical pain my life had offered were those childish accidents, falls and knocks, that outrage more than they hurt. This was far worse, and yet what I remember from that first encounter with electricity was the debilitation, as though the cords controlling my limbs had been snapped. No doubt the lingering drugs made it worse. I found myself lying once more on the leafy soil, struggling to breathe, aware that I was the object of renewed curiosity from my fellows. I wished that you might not see my shame, and of all my desires this one was granted. You had lost no time seeking whatever slender refuge our prison had to offer. Certainly you spared no interest for a confused and clumsy stranger.

I feel tenderness toward my past self when I think of that time, of the day when I was first thrown out under the sky to find my own road back to retribution. I would like to tell that hatchling, _Take heart. Her indifference will not last._

If nothing else, you must agree I was right about that.

#

I had learned the nature of the fences, and as I waited out my solitary confinement, I learned another new thing: our prison, though larger than any room I had seen while in the laboratory facility, was not the only one of its kind.

I say this as if it were a conclusion readily arrived at, but of course I was baffled that first day, as the sun sank behind the mountains—with a sinister and creeping slowness compared to the electric lights I was familiar with—when I heard, very distant through the trees, a deep, rumbling _boom._ It rolled on and on, chasing its own echo, and before it had died away another answered it. The sounds continued, and at last I understood that they came from living creatures, the same creatures whose smells were carried to me upon the freshening night breeze. And as I waited out the dark, empty hours, my vigil was rewarded near midnight by something different: a hooting noise, like and unlike the birds that I had already come to know. There were things out there in the darkness. And then I remembered certain glimpses I’d had when I was transported from one lab to another, things seen through a viewing window or on a computer screen, and I knew that the masters must have made many other kinds of creatures, and set them in prisons scattered around this landscape. Another charge of arrogance to lay upon their roll.

On the third day, our masters released me to take my chances with my fellow inmates. I do not know whether this step gave them any apprehension. It gave none to me.

I waited until nightfall, a time which I knew which the masters avoided. My fellow inmates had become so detached from their warlike instincts (supposing they’d possessed them in the first place) that any hour served as well as another to take them by surprise. The first one I killed was a lackey to their dunghill queen, a lick-spittle coward whom I had seen hurt you only when she had enough friends to sink the odds in her favour. I woke her from her slumbers with a powerful bite through the top of her spine. Her body convulsed in panic, already paralyzed from the neck down, before I forced my jaws closed and thus ended her terror.

The second one I killed was one of those who, driven mad by boredom and despair, knocked and scraped her head against the ground. She was relieved I think. There were two or three more who, alerted by the death-screams of their sisters, were roused to try their escape, but they weren’t fast enough, and I ran them down and slew them where they fell.

Finally I came to the leader, puffed up with pride, whom I had seen harass you so cruelly. I wanted this one to die in front of you, so I dragged her through the underbrush, legs kicking and catching upon trailing vines, to the corner where, trembling, you had waited out the alarm and tumult. I threw her at your feet. And then I opened her belly from hips to throat, and set my clawed foot in the middle of her slippery offal.

You believed I would kill you, did you not? This much I can deduce with confidence, remembering how you turned your head sideways to look clearly at what was coming. But was your weight also shifted very slightly to the left, and did you hold your right claw ready to tear upward, to draw blood from your killer as you died? Of this, I’m still unsure. I know that I didn’t want to fight with you; but if there was another way two beings could meet under this hostile and empty sky, I hadn't learned what it might be. And so I left you there. I didn’t push, though I could feel everything that would be between us with a force that, had I any knowledge of the sea, I might have compared to a rip-tide .

How many masters came the following sunrise, to stand upon the observation platform, wringing their hands and uttering cries of dismay as they overlooked my slaughter grounds! They forced you into the little cage where I had spent three nights, but me they drugged again before they dared to come remove the bodies. I didn’t mind. I have known from the beginning that they cannot kill me. I awoke and found our prison desolate, except for the one other; that one who is dearest to me in all the world.

And later that night, as the voices of strange creatures boomed through the jungle, you crept near in the darkness and looked at me, first out of one glittering eye, then the other. I quailed under that gaze, suddenly aware of everything I didn’t know, everything that you knew; everything that you knew about _me._ My heart thundered and my vision blurred, and I don’t remember anything that happened after that moment, until I perceived suddenly that you had left me again.

When the sun rose, your manner was once again the wary courtesy of a subordinate. This bothered me; but merely that you were there was a mercy so great, nothing smaller could dismay me. I immediately bent my thoughts to the challenge of making you understand our task, our sacred vendetta against the masters. I knew this would take more ingenuity and effort than any challenge I had yet faced.

So far, I have persuaded you—not entirely, I hope, through fear—to help me begin testing the fences. We do them one section at a time, with our claws and teeth and our own singed flesh. It isn’t difficult to jump above the level of the concrete, but the barrier extends upward another two body-lengths in the form of cables strung between metal posts, and these are electrified. You don’t flinch from the pain, as I knew you would not. This is no torture of our masters imagined for our degradation, but a stern task of our choosing. Yet, so far, we have found no point of weakness.

Saddened but forgetful, the masters have gone away. All but one. This one, with his pale eyes, and a big hat, stands on the parapet in his heavy boots, cradling his gun. I recognize the weapon they use to fire the sleeping drug. He would like to shoot us both with something more deadly, but they will not let him. They don’t believe what he tells them, that you and I carry their death in our souls.

But oh, my sister, my heart... They will know it soon.

#


	2. Chapter 2

It was raining that evening. The earth, trampled bare of vegetation by a generation of prisoners, turned liquid and flowed over the ground, while the electric fencing ticked quietly from the moisture.

Rain was a constant feature of life outside the labs, and though cold and uncomfortable, I liked its effect on the air and leaves, how it folded us invisibly into its noise and motion. I could guess already that this invisibility would become a useful weapon.

We’d been fed in the morning. Though my purge of the prison residents had been necessary, it had this unfortunate consequence, that the masters no longer brought our food to the gate, where we might have seized the occasion to make a break for freedom. Instead, they rigged up a machine that let them lower a food-animal (a creature with wet eyes and nose, covered with short, black hairs) from above our heads. Each time we protested this demeaning procedure by mangling the suspension tackle; but the set-up undeniably offered meager avenues for escape.

Important though this setback was, it could not make me regret the killings.

The afternoon had been cloudy, and thunder menaced on the forested horizon. A cavalcade of Land Rovers passed our prison, carrying a large group of masters, but I directed you to stay hidden in the undergrowth and not engage our enemies. You accepted the wisdom of this strategy and gave me no uneasiness; all my worries came from a different quarter.

What I have avoided mentioning until now—because the reflection is very far from giving me pleasure—is that there was a third survivor with us in the prison. Having boasted of my kills, the time comes to admit that one at least had been less clean than I intended. While I was drugged, the masters spirited this victim away and, by their subtle arts, restored her to her strength. Long after I’d forgotten to think of the old tenants, she reappeared in the segregated cage, and without recognizing her at first, I felt sympathy, remembering my own experiences upon leaving the labs. But she knew her old executioner all too well, and reacted with a terrified stillness that was nearly catatonia. It was this fear that betrayed her, for it took me little time to deduce the cause, and to feel annoyance for my slipshod work.

The remedy, at least, should not be long coming. I chose a position under the straggly palms to watch and wait. I never stirred one muscle more than did my prey, yet I held her attention as if iron riveted us one to the other, and I quickly perceived by her leaping pulse how fast her spirit was disintegrating. I can delight in such a battle, that is settled by pure will long before either party makes their first move.

It pleased me less that you should see her, your old tormentor and the proof of my failure. But Fate’s will was that only honesty should exist between us, and something in my deepest heart cannot cease to be glad of it. Noticing the new inhabitant, and my reaction to her, it was impossible that you should not immediately understand everything. But your reaction, so terrible in my anticipation for being beyond my powers to predict, confused me. After a single look you continued with your daily routine, both those actions, such as destroying the feeding tackle, and testing the electrical fences, that I had established for us; and others of a more personal nature (I cannot remember them now without overpowering tenderness): the afternoon dust-bath, and the cleaning of your claws. When I wouldn’t join you, even to eat, you came close to me of your own accord—rare delight, which my folly prevented me enjoying—asking with low sounds and meek posture, whether I would not leave my murderous vigil and join you.

I would not.

Or rather, I had no intention of doing it. But as you began our perimeter patrol you froze as if startled, and uttered long hiss. You had my attention instantly. As you intended, I looked up, and saw a master watching from the observation platform. Chagrined, I recalled that the power remove this barrier that separated my prey from me lay outside our walls, and I saw how poorly calculated my actions were, if I truly wished to have it lifted.

Now I was the one who bent my spine meekly as I took up my portion of our routine patrol. Your foresight, the wisdom and subtlety of your mind, overawed me, and in my optimism, I even took your kind hint as approval, and perhaps a still warmer feeling. It must have tickled your humour to see me hanging so unsuspecting on your heels, while you encouraged my nearness with a tolerance you had never shown before. But this was a grace that I could not reflect upon without dizzying floods of emotion. I had to wall it from conscious thought simply to maintain basic function—how then could I have grasped the hidden feint within it?

After a few days of our unaltered behavior, the masters released my victim into the larger cage. That was when you reaped the reward of keeping me at your side. When the bars slid back, you sprang for her before I had a chance. She was paying no attention to you—I don’t think anything existed for her in the world at that point, except the bloody promise in my eyes—and she didn’t lift a claw, even when you collided with her and she fell on her side. But this stupidity was not to be the end of her, not that day, for your intention was not to harm her.

You were defending her.

I snarled as you stood between us, spat out filthy threats even against my love—so greatly does the soul dislike to be thwarted!—but you returned my stare calmly. After these anxious weeks of living together, you’d guessed there must be some constraint that kept me from harming you, though I believe its real strength still eluded you. You were unsurprised when my fury collapsed into baffled hurt, and I made my shamed retreat.

Thus the little society in our cage entered a new order. You didn’t wish me to kill her, and were ready to interpose your own body to prevent it, but it goes without saying that I never warmed toward her. I came to hate the scars I had given her, which seemed to demand some comparison with the marks of your honourable suffering. In my moments of greatest stupidity—and I am not immune—I asked myself what might have passed between you before my arrival. As if I had any comprehension, still less _right_ to your past!

The interloper stayed. She knew well to whom she owed her survival, and hung upon the slightest change in your mood. And so, on that long, rainy afternoon as the Land Rovers crept past our prison, I was forced to depend on your good sense and ability to keep her quiet. She smirked at me after the vehicles were gone, and I longed all over again to have it out with her.

Thrashing her would have been more than just the childish gratification of my jealousy, for I was in sore need of an adversary just then. The other part of this narrative that I haven’t told in exact sequence is that, since coming to this outdoor prison, my body had begun to change. I had gained some weight, and carried it lower in my body, near my pelvis. The question of how this difference might affect my fighting ability obsessed me. After my mind, my body is my first, best weapon. What good would it do, after all these toils and tests, if I succeeded in coming face to face with our enemies, only to discover I had regressed to the clumsy flailings of a hatchling? A few unbridled minutes with our intrusive third inmate would have been enough to tell me whether the old skills were still sharp; but your wary eye restrained me.

Dusk slid almost imperceptibly into darkness, and we started our perimeter patrol. This was, I admit, a make-work project of mine, for the meager confines of our prison, surveyed all too quickly, were unlikely to yield new insights or surprises. But the routine kept us at that vigilant pitch that I believed indispensable, and indeed it was on this unpromising night, as the rains hissed down between the palm leaves, that I felt, up through the bones of my feet, what was to be herald call of our freedom.

The ground shook.

You and I locked eyes, surmise floating between us. Were the masters, with their heavy earth-moving equipment, building some new prison? Was it a different kind of thunder, a new phenomenon of this still unpredictable sky? Was it our opportunity at last? And most of all that delicious uncertainty that comes from being Two instead of One: what would the other do, how would they react?

So began a long hour of waiting. We finished the patrol hastily, wanting to be ready for what came next. Nothing much followed. The rain still fell, and the electrified cables overhead still crackled and spit. The vibrations came and went, making the water ripple in its pools among the tree-roots. A roar, like the ones I’d heard my first night, but louder, closer. And then the noise of tires on wet asphalt. A single Land Rover, racing along faster than I had ever seen them go. Through the slivered view that the gate allowed us, I saw the yellow beams of its headlights slewing back and forth, barely staying on the road. All three of us gave up any effort to appear normal and crouched in the shadows with our eyes straining into the dark. How dearly I wished, at that moment, to have the right to touch you, to press only the side of my fore-limb against your flank and know that you were with me.

Still more of those earth-shaking impacts that seemed each one to jolt my heart into synchrony, as strongly as the electric current, and finally the creature who was to be the angel of both our hope and our great destruction, loomed up from the darkness.

The thunder-walker was built like us, but every element had been conceived on a more massive scale. I believe my whole height could have reached only the first joint of her leg, and her jaws were so enormous that her teeth could have closed around me without giving me the slightest scratch. She wouldn’t be as flexible as us, I noted, wouldn’t be able to twist and strike with the same speed. But then, she wouldn’t need to; and I felt again my odd, unbalanced body and the ungovernable emotions, the swampy, disabling _love,_ which I feared, despite myself, might be no more than an alien symptom stemming from the same change.

It was our cowardly third who broken the tableau, dashing away to the farthest corner of the undergrowth. The thunder-walker’s enormous head swung in the direction of the movement. Her left eye, glittering in the distant safety-lights of the observation platform, fixed upon the two of us, and she lunged. There was nothing between us but some spindly bars of steel, and though convinced that she couldn’t cross them, I still flinched at that powerful rush.

It stopped. She roared again and shook her head, frustrated, but she didn’t try to smash our gate. She knew and disliked the electricity. In a flash, the conviction seized me that she too had been imprisoned at some point in an electrified cage. But, _but_ —and my heart sang, then, with a triumph so savage that the masters should have heard it in their shiny labs and shivered in fear.

She had gotten free.

#

Is it not satisfying, the crack of the egg-shell that lets the cool air in? I wish I could live through your memories of it as if they were my own, to feel what they mean to you. I think for me, I kept trying to recover that moment all the days of my youth; and you know how that story ended, because when I found it, it was you. But back to the first time: what was hard turns out to be brittle, what was small turns out to be immense. New abilities flood through you, the powers of sound and motion, a potential whose limits are beyond your power to know, may not even exist at all.

That is my earliest memory. My second earliest is of hands wrapping around my body, tugging the blood-warm membranes away from my face so that the light pierces my eyes and gives me my first experience of pain. There is a cooing sound. There is love, as clinging and tepid as those tattered membranes, while the master who is first among masters, their King, I suppose, beams down at me.

Perhaps you also have this memory. I believe he was there at each of our hatchings, for he wished to imprint us upon him, to bind us to him with fetters of love. Did he not make us, fibre upon fibre, flesh and bone, to be precious in his sight?

And shall I not kill him, this master, the greatest of my enemies?

#

The thunder-walker went away. Perhaps there were other, easier prey for her out there in the forest. Perhaps soon we would see them for ourselves. The night decayed, but I had no sense of the passing time, not until the shapes of the palm fronds began to grow more distinct and the sky lightened a shade. But it wasn’t the change of light that roused me.

The electric cables, that had emitted that faint _tick-tick_ through all the dripping watches of the night, resounded suddenly with a no less audible silence.

You looked at me with astonishment, and the flattering thought crossed my mind that you might think this was my doing, though Heaven knew I was blameless, unless we believe that yearning can be strong enough to have effect over wires and cables. But I was as dumbfounded as you, and we stood for another long minute before, with one explosive movement, you leaped above the concrete level of the wall and hooked your fore-limbs through the steel cables.

It should have been me who made the first attempt. It is _my_ vengeance after all. I was not even certain, at that point, whether you desired to quit our prison, or had only humoured me as a deadly lunatic. But it came to me, as you wobbled there on the ramparts—you hadn’t expected to succeed, and couldn’t think what to do next—that you were, of all things, _curious._ You had simply wanted to know. With that realization, the emotions that had put my brain in such disorder rose up and threatened to swamp me once and for all.

There was a deranged and impossible moment when I even wanted to protect you.

Unprepared and hopelessly overbalanced, you tumbled backward, bringing cables down with you, like festoons of worthless trash. Throughout this world-changing discovery, the Interloper, worn out by her terrors, like a hatchling, but the screech of deforming metal wakened her. Her head poked out of the underbrush as you scrambled back onto your feet, startled, but rather pleased. I alone was still off balance, with my strange, heavy body and my ungovernable love. And as I struggled to master myself, suddenly I knew two things. I don’t mean I had in me any full understanding of the implications, still less how these had come about. They were just two facts, as inarguable as the reality of my own selfhood and of yours.

First, though I had no idea how or why, I was bearing eggs within me. And second, our prison was no more.

# 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that in the movie they say that the frog DNA has given the dinosaurs the ability to change sex. But I find it equally plausible that they are producing eggs through parthenogenesis, like the New Mexico whiptail lizard, and it fits my story better so that's what I'm going with.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for explicit sex in this one, and also perhaps a little religious language that might verge on blasphemous.

To get the three of us over the concrete barrier I used liberal displays of claws and teeth, not waiting to see whether either of you would seize your freedom of your own accord. On my roll of shame, this one sits very heavy: that my impatience made me the thief of your honour. For the other creature, well. I would have rejoiced to leave her behind, had I been equal to the disgrace of knowing that one of my own kind stayed in captivity, but in your case, I _ought_ to have accepted your decision, no matter what it was; I ought to, but I could not. For in that moment I stood at the apex of a struggle which would have been death to fail—and my enemy, a craven voice that told me it would have been better for my sake, had you remained a prisoner.

I had always known that by freeing us from our walls of steel and concrete, I would remove the only physical constraint that kept you near me. We couldn’t know the dimensions of the outside world, but I had to suppose that it was large enough that two souls might wander its surface without need of meeting.

After all, I knew myself an object of fear to you.

With these and other arguments, sweet and bitter mixed together, the vilest version of myself spoke to me, urging me to leave you in your captivity. I knew it was better to become hateful to you than to yield to its voice. Without consideration for what your wishes may or may not have been, up and over we went, and stood a moment later on the road. The forest rose on the other side of the gravel in a series of rolling hills. Birds flitted back and forth, paying as little heed to the concrete walls as they had ever done. But this time, were outside with them.

This sensation was so new that, though my plans for this moment had been contemplated down to the smallest detail, I could not immediately marshal my thoughts for what came next. I picked my way almost mindlessly along the road, discovering that I liked the feel of its paved surface less well than the leaf litter that covered its shoulder. That was just as well. Though the road led quite literally to my destiny, I didn’t intend to prance up the middle of it, giving my enemies every chance to see and take precautions. While still keeping its thoroughfare in sight, I slipped further among the trees, adapting my stride to the varied surface of this new world.

You followed me. I was uneasily aware of you gliding through the trees, a presence I couldn’t explain. On the one hand, I had worked for weeks to reveal to you the great vengeance in which we partook. What else could your following mean, except that you too had embraced our duty? I should have been transported with joy. On the other hand, I could not kill the realist in me. Already I had steeled myself for a painful separation, and to postpone the rupture unsettled me profoundly.

It went without saying that our unwanted third should follow _you_ , though it seemed unjust that I also had to suffer her company.

We turned deeper into the woods. I hoped higher ground would help me organize my strategy by quickly showing me the magnitude of the territory I had to deal with, and indeed we’d hardly been climbing long enough for me to feel the strain of exertion when a gap in the trees showed us a huge valley stretching below. Our vacant prison stood at one end of it, looking drab and grey in the morning light, but in the middle of the valley, resting on a square of soft-looking green, was a big building constructed from angles of glass that flashed red in the rising sun. Unlike our prison, I sensed that this building had been designed for display, meant to elicit awe or possibly even fear.

If that was their intent, then I would have to find a way to raze its glass and concrete to the ground; for no threat, real or implied, should be permitted to occupy the same earth as me. But as this conviction swelled within me, I looked at you. You turned your yellow eye from me to the vista in front of us and back, but in your body I saw none of the chaotic emotions that caused my limbs to so tremble. You were steely calm; and so misgiving seized me. Had I underestimated the masters? Having made me, they might justly imagine that they knew me. Had they known how to build just such a lure, to combine threat and challenge in such exquisite proportions that I must be drawn to it—thereby turning my attention from what was truly vital?

Troubled, I turned again to go downhill.

In our travels through the glades and thickets, we sometimes encountered a concrete moat cutting across our path, and sometimes there would be a fence, no more offensive without its electricity than a tangle of flimsy wires. The land had been scarred by these structures of unfreedom, and by their testimony foretold that we should soon encounter more of the prisoners they’d once held. On the banks of a shallow pond, we saw a herd of animals who must have wandered out upon the unfettered meadows. The new animals were more similar to us than to the masters, but with long, willowy necks which they lifted and lowered, dripping amongst the water weeds.

When the Thunder Walker had appeared outside our prison the night before, I’d known she must be respected. The same instinct was what told me that these creatures were prey—not, like the hairy, wet-nosed thing that they lowered in the tackle, merely _food_ , but beings whose essential nature was to be chased down with all the joyful skill we had in us. One look told me that you’d been affected as I had. To hunt—it was something else the masters had sought to rob us of as they stunted and stifled us at every turn. Now the wild spirit moved through us; not even the storm that had torn down the palm trees was more powerful and unbounded than we felt at that moment. And of course, we did everything wrong.

We should have taken stock of the terrain. We should have started by following the herd at a moderate pace, close enough to unsettle but not panic them, while we took our time choosing the weakest one to be our prey. And one of us—you, I think, for no one surpasses your subtlety of judgment—should have swung out in due time ahead of our victim, and readied the ambush. But I describe what is beyond elementary: had a human stood before me, I would not have moved a claw before I could visualize each step leading to my enemy’s extermination. Against the games of the masters, my mind was armored in cunning; but against a delight so free and innocent, one leaping so directly from my entrails, no prudent calculation could raise the least defense. No pause for reflection; we burst into the midst of the herd, scattering the prey-creatures in all directions. You bolted after one at random, and I joined the pursuit.

How alive we were! The thicket flew past me, the last traces of morning fog still pooling in the hollows. The ground we ran over demanded our focus at every moment with its unpredictable ridges, hollows, deadfalls, stones, and yet it was as if my body, though gravid and heavy to me as the body of a stranger, soared above it all, as if I did not even need to think. Even your craven protégée must have felt this exultation as she loped behind us, her jaws parted to suck the clean air over her jagged teeth.

One thing above all was marvelous, that here in the hunt you were not divided from me. The opacity of your mind, which had tormented and enthralled me from the moment I saw you, was burned away as if by the morning sun, and we ran as a creature moved by one single will. For that alone, I could have lived in this moment forever. It was becoming clear that we were no longer gaining on our quarry, who was a healthy adult in the prime of her life. No look traveled between us, but I felt your eyes flicker to the left, where for some minutes we’d seen gaps flashing between the trees, the open space of a dried watercourse. At the same moment, and animated by the same thought, we surged up on the quarry’s right. It was a burst of speed we could never have maintained, not if we wished to have the strength to kill anything afterward, but the mere sight of us made our prey leap sideways in fear. She burst into the open, and instantly the round cobbles of the stream bed were under her feet. She stumbled; the bone in her lower leg snapped. Her eyes were filming with shock even before I slashed her throat.

Then came the joy of the feast.

This was hunger such as I had never felt before, a genuine and unforced desire for food, and not merely because nourishment was necessary for some task. It involved our whole bodies, ripping, tearing and crunching, and if we did not scratch each other to pieces it was by purest chance, for I am not certain in that state that I could have recognized the sensation of pain. And as time went on—I don’t wish to say the sensation changed, for it didn’t feel distinctly different, even when the grappling over our meal had less and less to do with bolting food into our stomachs and more to do with bumping up against each other, scraping, _touching_. I was conscious that the presence of our third became more intolerable than ever. When she darted at a shred of thigh muscle that could plausibly have been considered my property, I roared out the most violent threat that my brain could conceive.

You didn’t reprimand me, as you would have back in the prison, didn’t demand that I play nicely. You stared at me, your chin still painted with the blood of our prey, and I could _feel_ the eggs within me, heavy and ripe, as if my skin were about to split. Then you curved your neck back, gasping a moment at the sky as I gazed upon the softness of your throat, the only part of you that was soft.

The lifted neck. How had this gesture, which cradled within it an entire language, come down to us, raised as we were under artificial lights and cut off from our own kind? Nature’s grace, bestowing freely what we had been too impoverished to know even to desire, lavished on us this secret way to speak to one another.

I don’t know where or when the annoying interloper had vanished, but the two of us were alone. You turned your back to me, and I staggered over, half intoxicated, and bit the back of your neck. This violence gave you no consternation, though my mouth was smeared with blood and though I had used exactly this method to kill others who looked like you. I pressed my belly against your flank, so you could feel my— _our_ eggs. This was our body. I gave it to you. The rough skin between us was nothing but a baffling barrier that I must find a way through so that we could meld entirely.

Then you shifted to one side, lifting your tail, and with a jolt, the swollen, blood-warm openings of our cloacas were pressed against each other. My muscles contracted. It was like the first time I touched the electric fence, except that what I felt was not pain.

My senses returned to me with great slowness. My legs could barely hold me up, but you bore my weight patiently. Now and then I felt a faint ripple of muscles through my chest and belly, the only evidence of how greatly you had been moved.

That is the moment that I think of most often: that stillness, and not the ecstasy and blood that came before it. Little by little, we were once more becoming two beings instead of one, but even then the possibilities of that moment still hadn’t collapsed into the inexorable arrow of fate. In that moment I could see a future in which we rested, and then rose to hunt again, never stopping unless it was to love each other under the open sky, a future in which I saw my eggs hatched, and eventually yours too.

In that future, would you have loved me, finally, the way I loved you? Or would I have been paying with base coin for a fantasy that had always been beyond my grasp, tempted by lust to erect some delusional romance over the reality of your indifference? What did you really think of the act we had just shared? Doubt twisted worm-like through my entrails even while I clasped your body to me. But the tide of vengeance, by contrast, was strong, and certain. The only risk it asked of me was surrender.

I let go of your neck. But I indulged myself, continuing to nuzzle it as long as you permitted before you moved away.

_The current is carrying us both,_ I thought; trying to convince myself of that which was no longer possible to know.

#

The sound of the Landrover finally shattered this melancholy spell. As we watched from our hiding place, the car pulled to a halt and a master got out. I needed to pay attention. The loss of the electrical fences would have been catastrophic for the masters, and all of their ingenuity should now be focused on getting them operational again. The sequence of move and counter-move would only accelerate, and my mind must not be divided—must not frivol and flirt, for example with schemes for seducing you again.

The man jogged briskly toward a low brick building. He was in too much of a hurry to close the door behind him.

I looked at you and for a moment there was a faint echo of the oneness of the hunt. But whatever was inside that building, the space was probably too constrained to give any advantage to us working as a pack. I could see that you knew this, that you agreed that one of us must follow the master alone. But these cold stratagems were all your flat eyes offered me.

I had desired you as an ally. I should have been satisfied.

The moment the shadow of the bunker’s interior fell on me I realized that this environment presented a new challenge. The surface under my feet was a metal grille with a dark void of unknown dimensions underneath, and when I nudged the door further open it struck something, resonating through the building’s depths with a clang. Quite possibly, all surprise was lost, but I still proceeded cautiously, feeling out how to walk without sound through this spider-web of metal. I could smell the master, in amongst the cold earth and diesel fuel. He was frightened, but some of that must have been the dark, closed space and the knowledge that we were out there. I don’t think he knew just how close.

He did not know, at least, until my weight struck his back. He was scrambling for his dart-gun, which he’d set down to work on some machinery. I put a stop to that by biting his shoulder and tearing until the limb popped free. It was informative to see how his eyes filmed over, so similar to the eyes of our prey animal. I believe that it is the exaltation of sacrifice that produces this phenomenon, a mercy and a glory all at once. I ate of him, some token mouthfuls to seal the sacrament. Then I set myself once again to thinking. I did not know what the man’s task had been, but it had been urgent and he’d left it unfinished, so it seemed logical that they would send someone after him. My first care was to drag the body into an alcove where it would be out sight.

You were waiting outside for me—you and the other one. But before I could go to you, I heard the musical clang of a footstep on the metal walkway above me.

 


End file.
